LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

Princess Batman

Breaking up the band

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And then there were 3 (or maybe 4, depending on how you count ’em).

They have an ON mode and an OFF mode.

Today Tim and Tara are coming over to pickup Fat Charlie and Mika. Lauren, I’m sure, will cry. I will keep a stiff upper lip. After all, they will be a total of 3 blocks away.

It turns out that they are all nice kittens. They are the tamest kittens that I’ve ever had (we had lots of cats and kittens while I was growing up). They let you hold them and pet them. When they play, they don’t use claws. They are well on their way to learning that you can only jump up on the counter when there’s no one home to see you do it.

Contrary to popular belief, you can have too many kittens.

There’s one left if anyone wants a kitten.

 

Last Saturday together

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If I understood Beth correctly, Charlie (Chewy) and Mika (Gracie) will be heading off to live with the Pesters sometime this next week. I’m glad they’re going to a place where they will be loved. I’ve done my best to teach all the kittens their responsibilities:

Like changing their water
Colder, lady. We like colder.

And loading the dishwasher
I'll 'rinse' those for you, mister.

And being vigilant – like their mother.
This was Robin, ironically.

Ol’ Bum Eye update

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Let’s have an update on Sarge. As you already know he has the birth
defect of hairs growing out of his eyeball. He had them plucked about a month ago, but they were growing back in full force and obviously bothering him. Today I took him in to Dr. Jay for his second plucking. I joked that this is like a weird spa treatment. Sarge has to be sedated for the procedure, so I took him in at 1 and came back for him after work. Having him recover there was sooooo much better, since he was just a little sleepy coming home, and not a crazed druggie like last time.

Dr. Dan was there this time to participate in the weirdness, and when I went to pick Sarge up he said, “This is a verrrry unusual situation.” I replied, “I know! You can’t find a write-up or even photos of it on the internet except for one of a human who has a cyst on their eye and hairs growing out of that.” (Sorry if you’re eating while reading this.)

Then I said how I looked at his eye this time and he doesn’t have just a couple of hairs, he has several. They laughed and said there are at least a hundred fine little hairs growing in there – in two patches. They told me to bring him back in about three months and they could do the surgery.

Now Lloyd and I have been arguing going back and forth on the damage that this could possibly do to Sarge’s eye. I think this is an iffy procedure, Lloyd thinks it’s a piece of cake.

I asked, “Are you going to be able to cauterize it?” Dr. Jay said that they would probably incise it – cut out the patches where the hair was growing. He seemed pretty confident but I asked, “Is there enough… eye mass there or will his eye goop out?” He said, “Well… there’s always risk involved.”

Sure, I’m concerned about Sarge, but I’m again at an impasse with always needing to be right. If I’m right, we have a one-eyed cat. If Lloyd’s right, well….. then I’m not right.

Sleepy in the sunshine.

Not all they’re cracked up to be.

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Had you asked me as a little girl if I’d like to have a cat who had
kittens, I would have gleefully jumped and down and perhaps squealed.

Had you asked me as an adult three months ago – same reaction.

When I actually had Princess Batman, crazy unstable cat? Still hopeful.

Now?

Oy.

It is not all that it is cracked up to be. The messes – oh, the
messes. Yes, I understand that they are just babies and this is a
phase and soon many of them will be gone and I will look back on this
time with the pleasant gift of amnesia and remember it fondly, but
currently I am living in a high state of rage most of the time.

The big factor now is that a few weeks when it was cooler and humid,
we left the windows open all the time, and the humidity must have
released uncleared Cricket pee smell from the subfloor in the play
area, and PB found it and was peeing there at night. GAAAARRRR! Now NO
ONE comes to the upper level until this is fixed. Carpet out, doses
and doses of specialized cleaner and a coat of primer tomorrow.

Carpet, pad, and baseboard out. Three soakings of enzyme cleaner. Primer tomorrow.

Then there is just the constant little stuff, like how they decide –
as a group – to start screaming for no reason:
“What do we want?”
“We don’t know!”
“When do we want it?”
“NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW! NOW!”

Or, screaming when they poop. Honestly. “I’m pooping! I’m pooping! Meow! Meow! It’s coming out of my butt! Alert! Alert!”

We have been using World’s Best Cat Litter (Multiple Cat formula), but
bought a couple of bags of regular formula last week, and all of a
sudden it started to smell like vomit on Saturday, which threw me into
yet another weeping rage fit. (I’m a little hormonal, too, so it’s not
just the cat stuff.) It was all dumped and replaced with different litter. ‘Bye, money. Hello, cobbled-together fan system.

Here is the kennel, with a fancy new ventilation system.

Oh, and I can’t sweep the floor (once a day) or scoop the litter boxes (three times a day) without five demon ‘helpers’ leaping and attacking my cleaning implement. “Get it! Get it from her hand! Give us back our poops, copper!” “Just take them out of the room,” I hear you say. Well, you try getting five kittens to stay anywhere, even with a door between you! Take two out, close the door, take two more, edge door open and set them out, one darts back in. See how this math works?

Oh, and the counters. They are locked in the bathroom at night but get to run around the first floor during the day, because five kittens in a bathroom 18 hours a day would be cruel, so they get on the counters. I can squirt them with a dinosaur when I’m here, but have to rely on tape loops when gone. Tape loops, you are letting me down.

They leak.

Oh, and Princess Batman, who has stomach issues, still doesn’t cover her poops. Neither does Christopher Robin, who has inherited her mother’s stupidness, scratching at the sides of the litter box, thinking that it’s getting the job done. (Princess Batman lives in the basement during the day so she doesn’t corrupt the others.)

So, while there are steps being taken to make it all better, surely I’m
allowed to have a little pity party with my First World problems, right?

Kitten Update – August 5th

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I think that I forgot to write about moving the kittens to a larger area once we solved the don’t-poop-on-the-floor thing. Lloyd was the one to figure it out. He happened to be walking by when one of them was trying to get the poop off its bottom. Turns out that their poops didn’t have enough mass to drop off, so they were dragging them out of the box. (Lloyd gently shook the kitten to help it along.)

So we used all that handy lumber to cordon off the library corner of the basement. They have room to roam, climb, battle and sleep. They haven’t figured out how to get on the coffee table yet, so that’s Princess Batman’s domain as she ‘watches’ them. (She’s a terrible mother.)

They’re getting big. They’re mostly weaned, but still nurse occasionally. Combined, they are bigger than their mother.

That's a lot of cat mass.

Here, for a little contrast:

Aw....

Sarge’s eye is on the mend. He looked fine after the plucking, and we were given some medicine to put in it three times a day to help with irritation, but it turned out the medicine was irritating. Poor guy. I checked him one morning and his eye was swollen shut. I called the vet office and they recommended taking him off of the ointment to see if it was just a bad reaction. (It was.) It looks fine now, but here’ what he looked like when I called him Ol’ Bum Eye.

Quit calling me Bum Eye.

So, overall, they are doing fine. I, however, am just about fed up with scooping litter three times a day. I don’t think the role of Crazy Cat Lady is suiting me very well.

We're pretty tired.